Product Review

The Babylon Project roleplaying game suffers from similar deficiencies as the series, the ideas are there they just fail to make the most of them. The book contains all the details and background ideas of the series which is essentially sound, but it fails in executing the rule system and you’ll have to put a lot of effort in to get the best out of it. But at least you won’t have to put up with any of the wooden acting.

The game is set during the development of the Babylon station after the Earth Minbarri war. But you’ll probably ignore this and set your game in your favourite period of the show. There’s plenty of background in the main rulebook without any of the mind numbing detail that will stifle your own epic ideas (yeah, right). You have the option to journey all over the galaxy. This can be anything from ships heading out of control into Vorlan space, frontier worlds that play like a dodgy future western (think Bravestar), politics on Earth or the Babylon station itself. This is one of the games strong points and it’s nice to find a game where there is no good and evil battle going on, just a bunch of aliens trying to get an advantage over humans and each other.

Character generation is the standard fair of attributes traits and skills. But it does limit your characters development sufficiently enough to stop your players from ending up super human. The skill and combat systems are also fairly identical to most other roleplaying games, they might not be ground-breakingly exciting, but at least they're easy to grasp.

The only supplement that was readily available in this country was the Earth-Force sourcebook. This gives you details on the Earth’s military as well as a sack full of new skills, rules and military equipment. Also included are rules for a table top space combat game that can be incorporated into your games and details of most Earth-Force ships and a couple from each of the other races. Finally at the back is a list of Earth-Force characters from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to famous Starfury pilots. These are useful to flesh out your games and throw in a few characters your players might recognise. This book does give you the feel of being rushed to print, a few of the rules don’t seem to have been thought through, the counters for the table top space combat are missing, the same picture is used three times for different Earth-force characters and the recruitment poster at the front has two of the most hideous people ever on it. The future is not bright for humanity if these are examples of Joe Average.

Overall The Babylon Project is an average game hoping to sell off the series license. So if you and your mates like the show it could be worth taking a look, otherwise there are probably more interesting Sci-fi games out there for you to choose. The books are currently out of print. Wireframe Productions holds the publishing rights, however the company no longer has a publisher and are presently seeking one So you never know the Babylon Project books could be available once again. If you see them around and you enjoy the TV series you might just want to pick up a copy.

Reviewed by Mark Jones (strange chap - Crab Dancing)